Raspberry white chocolate cupcakes

I wonder – do male cupcake-eatees ever hesitate at a pink cupcake? Purple? Pastels in general? I read once that upon studying babies / young children out of cultural context, boys and girls had no innate preference for blue or pink, respectively. I think someone else also told me that historically it was even the other way round; boys were given pink as it was closer to red, and passion, and other such fiery connotations. These little pink thingymagigs in any case disappeared at work fairly quickly, and I’m sure at least a few purchasers were male. Anyways.

I have a strong affinity for raspberry and white chocolate, so I think in the past I’ve made quite a few baked goods with this combination. Another good one is raspberry white chocolate blondies (with or without macademias). A second reason this week’s charity cupcakes involved raspberry is that I’ve learned how to spell raspberry! Can you tell? I have no idea why the ‘p’ is nestled in there. I realise it’s just as normal as knife, or pneumonia, but I’m not used to writing raspberry. Raspberry, raspberry, raspberry. It’s pretty hard to type, try it.

For a change, this is not particularly “based” on another recipe from elsewhere; I couldn’t find any that I liked. Instead, I took the plain vanilla cupcake recipe from http://www.faircake.co.uk (go and look; their photo gallery is to die for. ONE DAY I too shall be able to make such beauties! At least that is my (unrealistic?) aspiration. To that I simply added an arbitrary amount of raspberries (NB: still finding this hard to type) and white choc pieces (fairly traded, by the way. I should mention that I always buy fairly traded (Fair Trade or Rainforest Alliance) chocolate and cocoa.) Make a difference to the beautiful people that provide us with such heavenly food yourself by doing the same! The icing is vanilla buttercream, flavoured with raspberry juice and red Sugarflair colouring.

Ingredients:

Makes 12

100 g unsalted butter

120 g self raising flour

2 tbsp corn flour

120 g caster sugar

1tsp baking powder

2 large eggs

1 tsp vanilla

100 g raspberries (fresh, or thawed and strained of juices; keep for icing)

100 g white chocolate, in small chunks

200 g icing sugar

100 g butter, at room temperature

A little of the raspberry juices, and extra food colouring to pinken, if needed

I liked the faircake instructions, so I will provide them here, even if I did do my normal cream butter+sugar thing anyways. It goes….heat the oven to 160 oC (gas 4 for me). Stick everything in a bowl at once and mix with an electic mixer until combined. Don’t over mix, ie not more than 1-2 mins. Then plop into paper cakes (50-80% full). Bake for 15 mins, check, and if not yet done, for the further 5 mins, until pale/golden and springy. Cool, then ice. For the icing, simply mix away again, adding the raspberry juice or food colouring at the end. Be gentle with the amount; you don’t want to make watery, curdling icing. And done! Try giving out at a boy’s christening and see the raised eyebrows. If only we were still Victorian.